Who Is Fnu Lnu?

Unidentified Defendants Have Bedeviled Courts for Decades

When the man appeared before a federal judge in Manhattan to be sentenced in a drug case, he had a lawyer by his side, supporters in the courtroom and letters attesting to his character. Only one thing was missing: his true identity.

Throughout his trial and conviction, the defendant had claimed to be someone he was not, and no one had any idea who he really was.

“I sentence people almost every day,” the judge, Richard J. Sullivan, said, “and I will tell you candidly, I am not aware of anybody who has done what you have done in this case.”

Court records had listed the man as “Fnu Lnu,” shorthand for “First name unknown, Last name unknown.” The acronym is often used in the early stages of a criminal case, when investigators cannot identify a voice on a wiretap, or the identity of someone picked up in an immigration sweep.

But the designation, at once mysterious and common, has taken on a life of its own in courts around the country, with Fnu Lnus being mistaken for an actual name, confusing judges and lawyers, and in one case spawning a memorable newspaper correction and even an Off Broadway play.

At any given time there can be hundreds of Fnu Lnus in the court system. Such defendants’ identities are usually sorted out quickly, through fingerprints or by other means. But in rare cases where defendants have remained anonymous throughout their entire prosecution, defense lawyers end up making arguments that can border on the surreal.

“The question is not, ‘Who am I?’ The question is, ‘How do I know who I am?’ ” one lawyer, Steven Statsinger, told a jury last year in the trial of his client, a Fnu Lnu accused of stealing the identity of a man named Ricardo Hernandez.

Fnu Lnu is often pronounced phonetically, and years ago, as a practical joke, federal prosecutors in Manhattan would sometimes have an unwitting operator repeatedly page “Mr. Fuhnoo Luhnoo” over the intercom, eliciting peals of laughter as the name boomed throughout the building.

The full acronym has appeared in cases in legal databases for decades; a Chinese gang indictment in New York about a decade ago listed 28 defendants, almost half of which were Fnu Lnus.

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Federal indictments in cases where the designation for "First name unknown, Last name unknown" was used.

The name Fnu Lnu tends to appear in criminal cases; there are hundreds more references to John or Jane Doe, or Richard or Jane Roe, familiar designations used mostly in civil lawsuits to mask a plaintiff’s name or account for an unknown defendant.

Nonetheless, the odd letter combinations in Fnu Lnu, spelled as if it might be a name in a foreign language, has caused infamous mistakes.

In 1994, a Newport News, Va., newspaper, The Daily Press, published an article about a drug and murder case and listed people who had been charged, including one named Fnu Lnu, as if that were a real person.

The newspaper ran a correction, which might have been overlooked or forgotten, had it not been reprinted playfully in the Columbia Journalism Review, where a playwright, Mac Wellman, saw it and wrote a play with songs about it.

The show, called “Fnu Lnu,” was produced by Soho Rep, an Off Broadway theater. A 1997 review in The New York Times called the play “a work with important clues missing.” Mr. Wellman, who teaches playwriting at Brooklyn College, said the reprinted correction “was completely the inspiration for my play.”

Judi Tull, the reporter who had made the original error, later wrote humorously about the episode and the resulting play, declaring, “ ‘Fnu Lnu’ was my mistake, and it won’t die.”

The real-life Fnu Lnu cases that have bedeviled judges in New York have involved defendants who prosecutors said had taken on the identities of others.

One such case involved the man who claimed to be Ricardo Hernandez, who prosecutors said had applied for a Social Security card in Mr. Hernandez’s name in 1983 and had largely assumed his identity over the next 30 years.

At the trial last December, Mr. Statsinger, the defense lawyer, argued that as far as his client was concerned, he was in fact Ricardo Hernandez because he had been using that name for years and because “that is what he believes about himself.”

“How did he come to form this belief?” Mr. Statsinger continued. “How do any of us come to believe these things? What makes me think that I’m Steven Statsinger?”

The government called the real Mr. Hernandez, a 60-year-old Navy veteran, to testify. In his summation to the jury, the prosecutor, Matthew L. Schwartz, countered Mr. Statsinger’s questions about identity and belief.

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A program from “Fnu Lnu,” an Off Broadway play inspired by a newspaper correction published after the term was mistaken for an actual name.Credit
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

“In real life, people know who they are,” Mr. Schwartz said. “People know what their names are. They know who their parents are. They know when they were born.”

The Fnu Lnu defendant was convicted, and in May was sentenced by Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy to six years in prison.

In another case, a Fnu Lnu convicted in a series of robberies had also been accused of stealing the identity of a man from the Virgin Islands.

“We don’t know his real name,” a prosecutor, Todd Blanche, told Judge Laura Taylor Swain, adding that it would be unfair for the defendant to be able to continue to use the victim’s identity while in prison.

Judge Swain ruled that official records would list the man as Fnu Lnu, and added that the information he claimed as his own, like his date of birth and Social Security number, should be replaced with the word “unknown.”

In the case before Judge Sullivan, the defendant had been convicted in a heroin trafficking conspiracy and also convicted of charges related to using the identity of a Texan named Reginald Davis.

At his sentencing, the defendant’s current lawyer, Steven R. Peikin, argued for lenience, noting that his client had accepted responsibility for his role in the drug conspiracy. A prosecutor, Daniel S. Goldman, objected, arguing that no one yet knew the man’s immigration status or whether he was wanted for other crimes that might surface “if he were honest about his identity.”

The defendant even wrote to the judge, thanking him for a fair trial and closing his letter, “Sincerely, Reginald Davis.”

But Judge Sullivan told him, “What I am very much struck by when I look at your personal history and the facts and circumstances of your life is how much I don’t know, frankly.” He added, “I am left very much in the dark.” He sentenced the man to just over nine years in prison.

Last fall, Mr. Peikin filed a new petition, asking the judge to vacate his client’s identity-related convictions on the grounds that he received ineffective counsel from a previous lawyer in the case.

His client included a short affidavit. This time, it was signed not Reginald Davis, but only “Petitioner.”